The COVID-19 pandemic presented an unprecedented opportunity for health policy makers to garner information about public health crisis behaviour in order to inform future policies. In several African contexts, COVID-19 containment was negated by citizens’ resistance to and flouting of imposed pandemic government health policy through engaging in adverse death rituals. Likewise, many African governments’ policies did not take into consideration prevailing and existent death cultural rituals as well as forms of expression. Through multiple roles that form part of African death processes, such rituals and forms of socio-cultural communication have the potential to concomitantly affect past, present and future public health behaviour at interpersonal and societal levels. The article attempted to examine death socio-cultural communication that had the potential to threaten COVID-19 containment, in relation to health policy. Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions Theory guided the study. A content analysis of 10 online South African and international newspaper stories was conducted examining six African countries. Findings show inevitable disruption of African death culture and poor communication by governments. Citizens communicated dissatisfaction through flouting government containment interventions by covert mass participation in burial rituals to ambushing designated medical vehicles transporting persons suspected to have died of COVID-19. For effective pandemic containment, African governments need to co-create solutions with citizens that can simultaneously accommodate centuries-old death socio-cultural communication while upholding pertinent COVID-19 health measures.

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